Keeping all data copies on premise hasn’t prevented very large company data breaches. SolarWinds was breached resulting in their clients being breached. The routine software update notification was infected.

True. But I am less likely to be targeted than the Onedrive or Dropbox infrastructure. And I have a smaller attack surface. My biggest vulnerability (admittedly) is between the chair and the keyboard vs. the many chairs and keyboards managing their services. Don't get me wrong. The companies do lay out their policies and high level their procedures (most of them do anyways)... But a little paranoia never hurt anyone (famous last words).

That's my setup as well. Reasons:

- Tiny 120GB SSD is inexpensive.
- Much faster boot up than a HDD.
- I clone the SSD to another SSD.
- If OS crashes, I just swap in the cloned SSD. The data files are saved.
- I can installed the cloned SSD on a different computer.

Same here. As far as I know, the folders in My Documents do not show where they are physically located. I.E., no drive letters. E.G. On Win10:

This PC > Documents > folder name

Usually the documents folder is mapped to c:\users\documents. Technically you could remap that (eg, most corporations usually redirect it to "h" drive which usually points to a share of some sort) but most don't.

Late to the party, but not separate partitions, there's no need for that if you're using just one drive, really, but definitely on a separate hard disk (when possible, i.e. not on a laptop). My desktop has a small 240GB SSD for the OS, and a 2TB NVMe for the user directories, plus a 2TB SATA drive that is purely used to back up the NVMe.

It's all good. Partitions were more for systems where you could only fit one drive or the economics didn't make sense... but I find other than some ultrabooks and MacBooks most other recent laptops can handle either a second drive (m.2 or 2.5" of some sort). Otherwise I rarely use partitions any more.

I can see using a different drive would be easy on a fresh windows install, but is thee any easy and problem-free way for someone all of whose files (OS and data) are on C: to now do this?

Depends on your situation. If you're using a desktop, you usually have spare bays that you could insert another HDD in. If you're using a laptop, it will depend on the make and model of your laptop (and where you use it). If you could provide some more details, perhaps we can give you some ideas.

Easiest way is to partition the existing hard drive, create a D: partition, and move your data there.

Windows Disk Management can do this, or there are plenty of free partitioning tools that you can download.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...5-c9728f7d7d2e

I used to do the separate drive thing for ages, but haven't in recent times. SSDs are too small for data storage, NAS systems offer better storage options than desktops.

I just use a regular directory called "data". That data directory is monitored by SyncThing on my desktop and laptop. I also have SyncThing on my phone, which shoots all of my photos (one-way) to a subdirectory in the Data directory. Additionally SyncThing syncs the Data directory, one-way, with file versioning, to a TrueNAS server sitting at one of my other homes, with snapshots enabled.

That directory also gets backed up locally, nightly, to an encrypted archive, to an external drive, which gets pushed out to Backblaze's B2.

All of my video stuff is on external drives due to size, encrypted locally, pushed out to Backblaze's regular desktop backup service. I love B2, but don't want to pay THAT much for my little 4K GoPro / phone videos.

Is this foolproof? Nothing is foolproof. I once went through 6 layers (3 physical systems, each had a primary and backup mode) of systems redundancy in one failure, with each of the 6 layers fail due to a different reason. BUT, this setup gives me a fighting chance. In the case where I blew through the 6 layers, the remains of each layer helped me bring everything back online within an hour.